Mike met her eyes.
"Because the right thing isn't always the expedient one," he said. "And because Tyler Schmith didn't deserve six weeks of that, and whoever was going to do something about it, it clearly wasn't going to be the university."
She looked at him for a long moment. There was something in her face that had shifted during the conversation but had not shifted back, something that was still processing, still arriving somewhere.
She was looking at him not the way she had at the gate, with the cautious neutrality of a person assessing a stranger, but with the more unguarded attention of someone who has been sitting with a difficult thing and finds that the person across from them has made it slightly more bearable without trying to resolve it.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming and telling me this..."
"I mean it."
Mike looked back at her calmly. "I know," he said.
